Conversations on Pakistan’s Response to Crisis: Education and Gender

Date and time: Wednesday, August 19, 2020, 12 to 1 pm British Summer Time (UTC+1)

Register here.

Fourth talk in this series on education and gender in Pakistan.

The Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations and Bloomsbury Pakistan have teamed up to deliver a series of conversations on Pakistan’s response to the current COVID-19 crisis. Although Pakistan has not yet appeared in the lists of countries experiencing either the most infections or most deaths, it has taken dramatic steps to try to slow the transmission of the virus. In a country of more than 200 million people, with widely divergent access to the resources that might make self-isolation possible, it is difficult to assess exactly how this crisis is impacting different sectors of the country. In these conversations, we bring together people with a track record on publishing and thinking about education, health and the economy with specific reference to Pakistan to try and identify key challenges and contribute to effective policies and more accurate forecasts of what may come to pass.

In this conversation, we focus on education and gender in Pakistan. Dr. David Taylor will moderate a conversation between Professor Anjum Halai and Dr. Huma Baqai.

Join Online: The conversation will be livestreamed on the Facebook pages of AKU-ISMC (@akuismclondon) and Bloomsbury Pakistan (@bloomsburypakistan).

Speakers:

• Professor Anjum Halai, vice provost (Asia & UK) and dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at AKU. Professor Halai is an international education specialist with extensive experience of leading and managing large international research and development projects. Her research addresses issues of social justice in education due to exclusion on the basis of language, gender or conflict. She has grassroots level of understanding gender issues as they play out in teaching and learning, especially in mathematics, which is seen as a “masculine subject.”
• Dr. Huma Baqai, associate dean (Faculty of Business Administration) and associate professor of social sciences and liberal arts at IBA, Karachi. Dr. Baqai has worked with national and international media as an international relations expert and political expert and political analyst since 1999. She is a familiar figure on current affairs programs on Pakistan television. She has become a prominent public intellectual, thanks to her insightful analyses of conflict in Pakistan. She is a member of the Advisory Council on Foreign Affairs chaired by the foreign minister of Pakistan.

Moderator: Dr David Taylor, former director of the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, former interim provost for AKU, pro-director at SOAS and current chair of the Board of Trustees of Bloomsbury Pakistan. Dr. Taylor has carried out research on the recent history and politics of South Asia, including the development of the party political system, Hindu nationalism in India, the political history of Pakistan and the role of the mass media in the political process.